Gothic Photoshoot

A long long time ago, I had dreams of being a photographer. I loved taking photos, even if I wasn’t very good at it. I loved to find inspiration in places I’d visit, and I couldn’t get an idea out of my head until I’d taken photos. Even if they didn’t turn out well (which was usually the case), I just had to do it.

One of those times was when I was living in Buckinghamshire, England. My first son was just a baby at the time, and my best friend was a Polish wonder woman called Pat. She and I loved getting glammed up and going out on the town. She was my muse a lot of the time. I loved her beautiful face and the curves of her body, and I often treated her like my own little Barbie doll. Not that she minded.

One evening, when my son was about 6 months old, my husband and I had our first dinner out without the baby. Pat watched him for us. We had a nice dinner at a pub, and then we walked back home through the graveyard.

I gotta tell you – English graveyards are so much cooler than American ones. I never got tired of visiting new cemeteries in the UK. They were usually MUCH older than anything we have here, and the graves were so much more full of character. This particular one was from the 1500s, and you can imagine how neat it was going through and reading the hardly legible inscriptions on them. And being that it was early autumn, the colors were just so beautiful – faded almost transparent. A kind of muted palette that moved me.

I NEEDED to do a photoshoot.

So I headed home and spoke to Pat, and together we came up with a style that worked. I put hair extensions in her hair and did some heavy makeup with lots of eyeliner and red lipstick. I forced her into my corset and a black goth jacket I’d bought in Camden Market in London. She had on a red silk dress beneath it. I wish we’d had better boots, but we settled for some brown suede ones she owned.

We headed to the cemetery just as dusk was falling, and we had ourselves a really neat photoshoot.

Amazingly, the photos turned out beautifully. I’ve always been very proud of them.

Sadly, over the years, I’ve lost many of them, and the ones I have left are compressed digital copies that don’t do justice to the originals. But I found them stuffed in a folder on my PC recently, and I wanted to share them here.

So without further ado, here is the gothic photoshoot we did circa late 2011. Enjoy.